Schools rise to a 'can do better' challenge

By Caroline Milburn

June 20, 2011 — 12.01am

SOON after Wayne Craig was put in charge of all the state schools in Melbourne's northern suburbs, he invited the newly appointed head of the Victorian Department of Education, Peter Dawkins, to accompany him on a tour of several schools.

As the two men walked past a toilet block at one outer suburban school, they were suddenly overcome by a stench. "The toilets were putrid, I wanted to vomit — the smell was disgusting," says Mr Craig, recalling the 2006 visit and how his horrified boss demanded to know why the department had not invested in the school.

When Wayne Craig toured some of Melbourne's nothern-suburb schools, he was shocked with what he found.Credit:Rebecca Hallas

It had. Several years earlier the school received $3million to upgrade its facilities. "You would never have known it," says Mr Craig.

"The whole place was a shambles and the school had half-a-million dollars in the bank," says Mr Craig. "When I asked the principal how he could have conditions like that for kids, he said the department should fix it."

Advertisement

Wayne Craig with Professor David Hopkins

The incident is one of many examples of rock-bottom school morale Mr Craig encountered after being appointed as the department's northern metropolitan region director six years ago.

The region's 195 schools were mired in low academic achievement, except for some higher-performing schools in middle-class pockets such as Eltham and the inner north. It had the worst student performance in literacy and numeracy of the nine regions that make up the state's government school system.

Coming from previous jobs as a principal in the city's affluent eastern suburbs, Mr Craig was shocked by the extent of the malaise.

"To go into some of our schools was almost heartbreaking," he says. "There was almost despair in some places. There were plenty of people doing a good job but it was never across the school or across a number of schools. I was dismayed by the way, in some classes, teachers had given up trying, and I spoke to lots of teachers about what was going on in their schools."

For many teachers, working in schools weakened by bad results and falling enrolments, the task of teaching mainly disadvantaged students was overwhelming. Families unimpressed by their local school were sending their children elsewhere.

The endemic problems led Mr Craig to gather a team of education specialists, including an old colleague, Professor David Hopkins, a visiting professor at Melbourne University.

They devised an improvement strategy which could be used by all of the region's government schools across a vast swathe of Melbourne's north, including the municipalities of Hume, Banyule, Moreland, Darebin, Yarra, Whittlesea and Nillumbik.

Australian researchers have recorded examples of underachieving schools that have turned around, often through the efforts of a new principal or staff. But attempts to improve performance across a school system have proved more elusive.

In Britain and the US, nations with multicultural student populations similar to Australia's, national reforms initiated during the '90s faltered after early progress, according to several studies.

Mindful of being too ambitious, Mr Craig initially intended to try the improvement strategy in just one school but was deluged with requests from principals who wanted their schools involved.

The response marked a change from the defensiveness that often characterised the profession's debate about performance-driven reform.

"I figured things had changed when we got to that point because up until then school improvement was almost a dirty word," says Mr Craig, who has written a book, Power-ful Learning, with fellow team members Professor Hopkins and Melbourne University's John Munro, about the progress of the northern region's new education strategy.

Momentum for change was also coming from school regeneration projects in areas such as Broadmeadows and Heidelberg, part of an education reform policy introduced by the former state Labor government that encouraged schools with dwindling enrolments to merge and create new schools.

In Broadmeadows, 17 schools agreed to merge into nine, a process that involved intense, often heated debate among residents.

"There was a lot of community unhappiness about how poor the school facilities were, about the lack of subject selection and opportunities for their kids to aspire to go to university," says Domenic Isola, chief executive officer of the City of Hume, whose council was asked to sell one hectare of its 10-hectare town park to the department for a new school, Hume Central Secondary College.

The council received 600 submissions in favour of the park sell-off and 300 against.

When the northern region team began its school improvement strategy its members wanted to avoid the mistakes of the big reforms in Britain and the US, which relied too heavily on a top-down approach to lift student performance.

Professor Hopkins was chief adviser on school standards to the former British government between 2002 and 2005. He says initial student gains stalled in Britain and the US because reforms focused mainly on test scores and failed to concentrate on improving teachers' instruction skills and other capacities.

"You need a transparent system to give the public confidence in what you're doing, but in the UK we probably over-tested by testing kids at ages 7, 11, 14, 16 and 18," he says. "If you're moving a school system from awful to adequate you need a lot of external testing.

"But as you move it from good to great, schools need to have their own measures of gathering multiple types of data on the performance of their students." The northern region strategy focused on enhancing the skills of teachers in literacy, numeracy, student behaviour management and data evaluation. It also adopted an inside-out approach to reform.

Staff inside the school were given responsibility for changing classroom practices.

A school improvement team was set up in every school, with members representing a cross-section of staff, from novice teachers to senior staff.

The specialists, including Professor Hopkins and Dr Munro, often taught classes in the learning leaders' schools. The leaders then coached other staff in their schools and worked with their improvement team to embed consistent classroom practices across the school.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks was a long-held orthodoxy within the profession: that teaching is a highly individualistic craft, done in private behind the classroom door.

Mr Craig says the tendency to believe that a teacher's personality and performance are entwined has created a defensiveness in the profession when classroom practice is scrutinised.

Even teachers considered to be good at their job often see any critique of their methods as a personal criticism.

"There's a notion that the hand of God touched you, therefore you're a great teacher, when in fact there's a set of skills that are learnable," Mr Craig says.

"Personality doesn't have that much to do with it. I've known people who've been outstanding teachers who have been highly introverted or highly extroverted."

Getting teachers to observe each other in the classroom and then share information about their methods, and collaborate on lesson planning is a key element in the region's new strategy.

To overcome reluctance to the approach, staff were organised into three-person teams, where two would observe the teacher in class, then meet to discuss what worked.

"We put an argument to teachers that if you want to improve your teaching you have to be open to change, you have to be objective but you have to be observed," Mr Craig says. "As soon as we put it like that we had lots of schools jump in straight away. We've now got thousands of teachers observing each other teach.

"Teaching without that sort of input is a bit like driving a car for 30 years — you don't become a better driver because you're not thinking about what you're doing and no one's telling you what you're doing right or wrong."

The region's student results in literacy and numeracy have been steadily improving. Last year it became the second-best performing region in the state, with results in years 3, 5 and 7 at or above the state mean in reading, writing and numeracy. Year 9 was the least impressive, with results slightly below the mean in literacy and well below it in numeracy.

The region's VCE results are rising and the number of year 12 students going to university has jumped from 36 per cent in 2006 to 40 per cent.

Student morale has climbed to or above the state mean level in most grades, according to the annual survey that all Victorian government school students in years 5 to 12 complete about their perceptions and experiences of schooling.

Teachers are more optimistic about their impact on students. The regional data shows a big improvement since 2006 in teacher opinions about student willingness to learn, according to the annual staff surveys collected by all schools. But the region's tracking data on schools also reveals that although many are showing evidence of sustained improvement, particularly at primary level, some are not.

Progress has been patchy in secondary schools, partly because of their complexity.

Meredith Peace, deputy president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union, says most teachers have welcomed the changes.

"Getting people to work collaboratively and reflect on what they're doing in the classroom is a very difficult thing to do," she says. "But if our members are given support by the department to do that they'll react positively, and so far that's what's generally happened."

Professor Hopkins, who spent most of last month working with principals in the northern suburbs, is upbeat about the region's ability to continue improving. He says the transformation of a school system depends on neighbouring schools developing and sharing excellent practices, a habit that takes time to nurture.

"When I first came here principals and teachers were very sceptical, insular and conservative," says Professor Hopkins, who is also now working with schools in the department's Loddon Mallee and Grampians regions. "Their overriding attitude was that if kids are disadvantaged there's nothing you can do about it. That's changed dramatically. There's been a massive cultural shift in the attitudes and professional horizons of principals and teachers."